Innovation: A team effort!
Innovation can be found in all aspects of an organization. More recently, life science institutions such as hospitals, educational research centres and pharmaceutical companies are going beyond traditional innovation and looking for ways to transform the healthcare system. However, to embrace this vision, existing processes and systems must change.
The current healthcare landscape is no longer tolerating incremental improvements. Stakeholders are realizing that a more fundamental approach is needed. To prepare for future needs they are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and looking for ways to integrate it into their decision-making. AI can help pave the way for innovation, by not only helping organizations uncover existing data sources, but also by providing the tools needed to exploit them. More importantly, by investing in innovation, companies are creating a culture that is crucial to their future success.
How can companies foster an innovative environment?
They can start by creating a community that inspires creativity. Invention and discovery are the result of encouraging people to adopt a creative mindset, and this includes constant questioning and continuously looking for better ways of doing things. Innovative breakthroughs and creative changes come when people feel safe to take risks and to question existing methods. Managers must therefore expect failures and consider them learning opportunities, therefore encouraging their employees to explore and learn why some things fail while others succeed.
Once they have established an encouraging and creative community, companies need to support their innovators by providing them with opportunities to practice implementing their new ideas. However, to ensure a win/win, managers also need to ensure that their innovators are applying these skills effectively. However, to ensure a win / win situation, managers need to properly guide their employees. By using advanced AI decisional guidance to assign innovators to the right projects, organizations ensure that employees are using their skills to solve issues that are most important to the business.
A leading CRO was using multiple decentralized platforms for ongoing clinical studies. The complexity and effort required to predict the outcome of even a single new clinical trial was daunting. It required to search, merge, analyse, and interpret the data coming from multiple systems. This exercise normally required the equivalent effort of one full time data scientist and half an executive to complete. Using an innovation platform like GENAIZ, the CRO can leverage AI-driven biomedical analytics to automate 80% of the manual tasks and can therefore accelerate the data processing and statistical analysis phase of clinical trials.
Silos can be very harmful to innovation. They can make it difficult to access critical information, leading to lost productivity and collaboration. For this reason, it is important that organizations stimulate innovation by encouraging and rewarding employees for sharing their ideas and knowledge. By implementing an ideation process through which employees can suggest and brainstorm on better ways of working, companies can harness their “collective intelligence”, can find new solutions to costly existing problems, and can continue to foster an innovative environment.
Creativity thrives within a supportive and stimulating workplace. Encouraging people to collaborate creates space for discovery and progress. Shifting an organizational culture to one that supports learning from failures, and creates an environment where experimentation and growth thrive, requires the commitment of all leaders across the organization. Within an environment that supports innovation, all employees can become innovators and be inspired to turn their ideas into concrete actions that transform their organization, as well as the healthcare system.